[Footnote: _Do_., p.

447.] Advantages of the Frontiersmen.
The frontiersmen possessed every advantage of position, of numbers, and of temper.

In any contest that might arise with Spain they were sure to take possession at once of all of what was then called Upper Louisiana.
The immediate object of interest to most of them was the commerce of the Mississippi River and the possession of New Orleans; but this was only part of what they wished, and were certain to get, for they demanded all the Spanish territory that lay across the line of their westward march.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the settlers on the Western waters recognized in Spain their natural enemy, because she was the power who held the mouth and the west bank of the Mississippi.

They would have transferred their hostility to any other power which fell heir to her possessions, for these possessions they were bound one day to make their own.
Predominance of the Middle West.
A thin range of settlements extended from the shores of Lake Erie on the north to the boundary of Florida on the south; and there were out-posts here and there beyond this range, as at Fort Dearborn, on the site of what is now Chicago; but the only fairly well-settled regions were in Kentucky and Tennessee.

These two States were the oldest, and long remained the most populous and influential, communities in the West.
They shared qualities both of the Northerners and of the Southerners, and they gave the tone to the thought and the life in the settlements north of them no less than the settlements south of them.